A worthy effort: Shepherd's Warning by Cailyn Lloyd

Thanks as always to NetGalley for allowing me to read an early version of this book.

It is to this writer's credit (and those of her editors) that I did not realise that this novel was self-published until the last page. It is a passable horror story centred around a haunted Elizabethan mansion in Wisconsin USA. I seem to have hit a slew of books lately where the protagonist is particularly unmemorable and, unfortunately, this novel is no exception. For all of her seventh sight, incipient epilepsy and love for her granddaughter, I found it very difficult to get emotionally invested in Laura McKenzie. Her breakup with her husband should also have been emotionally wrenching to lend the tale more excitement but was just sudden and rather dull. Sometimes the prose is also quite tedious, the "room cants sideways" numerous times as our heroine hits the concrete, or should that be the wooden flooring? Also, it was never clear to me why she seemed to be the sole custodian of her granddaughter following her son's death... Where was her daughter-in-law? Oh well.

For all of that it was pretty readable although I would hardly describe it as unputdownable.

Tricky: Trixy by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

I admit that when I first saw this book posted on Netgalley since I was at bit of a loose end I decided to take it on as a sort of challenge. Trixy is a novel first published in 1904 and this, obviously, is a re-edition with an academic purpose which is in part to rehabilitate Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and also take another critical look at the development of the animal rights movement. But for me the question was, could I finish it?

Eventually the answer was "Yes", but not without a long hiatus in the middle in which I read a few other books which were more to my taste. The problem with Trixy is that it is very much of its age, it is melodramatic, over-sweet and has some very dense patches of purple prose, at crucial stages it also elides certain information by openly stating something along the lines of "I cannot describe this , it will be too hard on my readers" which I found patronising and somewhat insulting.

The first problem I had was with the heroine, who is not Trixy (Trixy is actually a little white poodle), but a very tenderhearted young lady of some means. She is a very stereotypical character which very few novels would get away with today. She is the amiable landlady of a bunch of 'umble tenants who for some reason that escapes me, love her to bits, oh, sorry that's right, they love her because she's so kind! Among her tenants is a frail crippled lad who is Trixy's owner as a way of making some sort of living he has taught the poodle to perform some tricks. This young lady is also courted by two gentlemen, one is a doctor and the other is a lawyer.

In a fairly novel approach, which is a former lawyer I cannot but applaud, the doctor turns out to be a baddie and the lawyer a goodie. For the simple reason that the doctor is a vivisectionist. At a crucial point, Trixy disappears, and well... You'll have to read the book as I did.

Apart from the melodrama the purple prose the hackneyed plot, this novel does have some redeeming features, that is a very good study of the coarsening of some members of the medical profession. I've had quite a few illnesses of my own in my time and therefore I've met many doctors physicians and nurses, most were fairly nice human beings, some were superb, and others, how shall I put it? Didn't seem to give a fuck. Phelps portrays this very well and in my view rightly attributes this deficiency to two main causes, the first being that some members of the medical profession are not very nice people to begin with and have joined the profession as a means of enhancing their status, exercising power or even giving free rein to their sadistic impulses. The second, and most original approach in my view, is that they have been bent and twisted and rendered indifferent by having too much power over animals and people. This group started off well, but had to harden itself in order to progress and have lost touch with an important part of their humanity.

For me this insight seems to be more valuable than the author's all encompassing anti-vivisectionist stance. At some point in the book she hints that she is condemning only unnecessary vivisection... But it doesn't seem to me that she modulates this. I am a pet owner I love animals but that is not the same as failing to recognise that in many instances experimenting on animals has helped medicine progress, indeed this is an argument that she puts in the mouths of one of her doctor characters but she actually only does so to discredit it.

There are some good scenes in this novel, one in particular I think will always stick in my mind. And as I said above it is in some ways very perceptive, but I am not sure that overall these two traits overcome the setback of what is a very dated text.

A Wild Spook Chase: Stoker's Wilde by Steven Hopstaken and Melissa Prusi

Dear potential reader

The epistolary novel, a novel based on "found" documents, mostly letters, sometimes diary entries and others, has a worthy lineage dating back to the Renaissance. Originally it was most typically used for the romance, for obvious reasons, the first epistolary novels were purported to be exchanges of letters between lovers. 

But in the 19th century it also found a very congenial home in the Gothic novel, the predecessor of our horror and terror novels today. The reason is clear, letters, documents, diaries, allow us, dear potential readers, intimate access to the supposed writer's greatest hopes and especially fears and apprehensions. Perhaps the best Gothic epistolary novel ever written is Dracula, penned by one Bram Stoker and published in 1897. 

If you haven't yet read Dracula, dear potential reader, you must do so forthwith!

Of course it is not necessary for you to have read Dracula in order to enjoy Stoker's Wilde, but it really would help. You see, Abraham (Bram) Stoker, a hearty. bluff, redheaded Irishman together with Oscar Wilde, also a rather large but effete, fey Irishman, are, dear potential reader, the main protagonists of this pseudo-Gothic epistolary novel. 

It starts with a hunt for a werewolf, then vampires, then the uncovering of a dreadful conspiracy and its artful subsequent dismantlement, in between there is theatre, amorous intrigue, marriage and infidelity. I was much afraid upon reading the first chapters, dear potential reader, that this novel would be childish, but my fears proved to be baseless! As a rather piquant sex scene involving Mr Wilde soon put paid and laid to rest, that trepidation.

The rest of the novel is a romp, a bit of a Scooby Doo spook chase with our heroes, the best of frenemies, having eventually to work together to unravel the mystery of the Black Bishop and banish his evilness to the nether world!

If you like the writing of Kim Newman, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novels by Alan Moore, you know what to expect: sterling neogothic.

Yours most sincerely,

Clariana

P.S. Thanks are due as always to NetGalley and also to Flame Tree Press for allowing me to read an early version of this text.

Simply a bloody good read: Stonecold Heart by Caz Freer

Many thanks to NetGalley for allowing me early access to this book.

A few months ago I blogged about Mark Billingham (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Their-Little-Secret-Thorne-Novels/product-reviews/0751566977/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_hist_4?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=four_star&reviewerType=all_reviews&pageNumber=1#reviews-filter-bar) and identified him as "one of the school of British crime writers who began to flourish at the beginning of this new century", well Caz Freer has just also entered those ranks with flying colours and a fresh new voice with a distinctive Irish accent. I am a very jaded whodunnit reader but this book was a breeze from start to finish and I could not put it down. The personalities of the different members of the police team were deftly portrayed, and especially their sense of camaraderie and purpose, so much so that you felt you were one of them or you wanted to be one of them. It brought to my mind that old TV series "Hill Street blues".

The murder was fairly routine as were suspects, a bunch of entitled upper-middle-class London egotists at least one of whom is a socially adept psychopath. The victim was a young female idealistic Australian gap year student. I solved the crime by applying my "Agatha Christie approach", but of course the crime is often not the main attraction of these kinds of books. That would be the police environment and the world of our protagonist, DC Cat Kinsella, who like the hero of those classic Taiwanese "Infernal Affairs" movies has one foot in the land of law and order and another, through her family connections, in the Irish criminal underground. Cat and her ongoing family, amorous and moral dilemmas make for a compelling protagonist which is a good thing because everything is seen through her eyes.
The murder is solved but there are many things still left pending by the end. 
Bring on the next book, I say!

Tangle's Game by Stewart Hotston: A Bit of a Mess

As always, thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read an advanced copy.
They say "never judge a book by its cover", to which in the case of this book a further injunction should be added which is "never judge a book by its title". What can I say? The cover is beautiful, the concept seductive but as for the text itself, well, C- would be doing it a favour.

The fundamental problems are, the plot rather than intricate is facile, the characters rather than characters are stereotypes, sometimes it seems even borrowed from far greater works, and Tangle isn't even the protagonist, this is his rather insipid and far less inspired or inspiring former flame, Amanda. Don't get me wrong it's good to have a techno thriller starring South Asians with a female lead but I really really wish this were better written.

Apart from the defects I've quoted above, there is a fundamental lack of research. For the most part if you are going to write solid sci-fi and solid thrillers you need to do your homework and it seems very little was done before writing this. I even checked the author's background to see if this shortcoming was simply because he was a man of letters writing about science, but no, apparently he has scientific qualifications it's just that the technical backdrop to this is as flimsy and unconvincing as one of those studio scenarios in the original Star Trek. It simply comes over as lacklustre. something that really got my teeth on edge was his use of "Frame" for what clearly was an IT "Window".

Regrettably I had much better things to do with my time than read this novel.

A New Beginning: The Never Game by Jeffrey Deaver

Many thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read a copy of this novel in advance.

Arthur Conan Doyle once grew so sick of writing about Sherlock Holmes that he killed him off. The greatest detective in the world accosted his arch enemy Prof Moriarty literally on a cliff edge overhanging Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland and after a furious tussle they both apparently fell to their deaths.

Happily, insofar as we know, Lincoln Rhyme is still alive and well in his New York apartment overlooking Central Park. But his author has decamped from East Coast to West and is focusing on a new character. This has always been a tough gig. Deaver has attempted this before with the character of Kathryn Dance, an expert in kinesics, the study of human movement and gestures, Kathryn never really worked for me.

Does Colter Shaw, the protagonist of The Never Game? Colter is one of the three children of a survivalist family headed by two former university professors brought up and home-schooled in an isolated estate in the Californian wilderness. He is an expert tracker and he makes his living by collecting rewards for finding disappeared people. We are soon told that he is not to be confused with a bounty hunter. The apparent kidnapping of a young female student following an argument with her father sets Colter up against a criminal mastermind of his own. Soon dubbed "The Gamer" this miscreant seems to be recreating with his victims the scenarios involved in an old survivalist-type game where the player is left in a hostile location with a certain set of objects as his/her only means of escape. Set exclusively in California, the plot has all the twists and turns you have come to expect from Deaver.

Unfortunately, I have to say I found Colter unconvincing and unlovable.Home-schooled almost in isolation in the wilderness yet he's completely au fait with modern gadgetry? Ah, but his parents were professors! He knows a massive amount about culture and psychology? Well, they had a library, you see... Sorry Jeff but I ain't buying.

As for his personality... Well... Um... He doesn't really have much of one. At first I thought one of the reveals would be that Colter is autistic he was so much of a blank slate, well it wasn't. Damn. Lincoln may be in a wheelchair but he oozes personality, I especially like his occasional musings on "crips" as he calls himself, his disability, his arrogance and his attempts to get at the whiskey. Entirely absent in Colter.

Don't get me wrong, Deaver is a good writer, the twists and turns of the story made this novel go down quick but I couldn't help missing Lincoln or any other personality come to that. There is only one thing that might be the hook that'll make me pick up the next Colter Shaw book, the family mystery of who killed his father and why.

A Triptych of Human Frailty: A Nearly Normal Family, by M. T. Edvardsson

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read an early copy of this book.

Although I am a great fan of whodunnits I am a relative novice when it comes to Scandi Noir. I managed to miss all those trendy TV series, and apart from a brief fling with Henning Mankell, I have only read two Scandi Noir novels proper. So I was looking forward to reading A Nearly Normal Family to make up for this obvious shortcoming in my history as a fan of the genre.

Alas! This ambition has been thwarted once again. Because A Nearly Normal Family is not a Scandi Noir novel. That isn't the same as saying that it's not a bloody good read, because it is. It is also not saying that it does not excavate somewhat the shortcomings of Swedish society, because it does. Or that at its heart does not lie a murder mystery, because, again, it does. It is simply saying that it does not have the narrative viewpoint of your typical police procedural.

It is a finely balanced text structured in three parts. We hear first the voice of the father, then that of the daughter and finally that of the mother. If this has a somewhat religious resonance, I am fairly sure it is intentional.

The father here is, literally, a father, a Pastor of the Church of Sweden. In other words an establishment figure but, for all that, I have to say of the Scandinavian type, in other words forward-looking and relatively liberal, but above all, moral. It is through him that we first confront the main plot knot of this novel, the murder by stabbing of a well-off youngish man, with his 19-year old being accused of killing him. We are faced with his confusion and his questions and he offers his point of view on his daughter's conflicted background as well as the first clues pointing to the circumstances surrounding the killing. At first we are sympathetic but then being in his, rather limited, head, besides the central dilemma confronting him, becomes somewhat wearing. Just when we are about to set the book aside with a sigh...

The second part begins with the daughter's point of view. Needless to say she is quite a different person from her father or what her father would wish her to be. 

And this is all to the good making a very refreshing change. The lack of stimulation of her current circumstances, she is being held in jail pending trial, contrast strongly with her vivid recollections of her life outside. She is at the same time passionate and contradictory, strong and weak, perhaps a far more believable character than her father, living in a completely different, more visceral, world from him. Her capacity for self-reflection is stimulated by a particularly inspired prison psychologist who gives her to read texts such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, The Catcher in the Rye and Crime and Punishment, which are also clear references for this novel.

The mother’s narrative seems far shorter than either of the former, and for me, less convincing, for example, she is supposed to be a highly qualified criminal lawyer, who is married to a Pastor, and she is unaware of basic biblical tales? Being an unbeliever does not make you ignorant of religious basics… Also her position is far, far, murkier than that of her husband and child, she knows but she almost does not dare to know. She acts as the ultimate “fixer”, like the holy spirit, who in church tradition may be female, and whose main function is to mediate between the father and his child.

Overall, I have to say as a novel, this worked brilliantly, and the central whodunnit is not resolved until the very last lines, but by then this question has lost all urgency and what the reader really wants to know is “Why was it done?” and “Will justice be done?” Which are, perhaps, far more important questions.

In summary, this novel may not be the Scandi Noir I expected it to be… But it may be all the better for that.